People have been arguing pro and con about Hemingway ...
since he first published in the 1920s. The truth is, he wrote some very good short stories, four pretty good novels (The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Arms, and To Have and Have Not), a good fish novella - if you like fish stories - some interesting autobiogrphical books, some pretty bad novels, a play, and a bunch of prose concerning bullfighting and Africa. His lifetime output to date is twenty volumes. I say to date because I don't know if another posthumous work will be published. Anyone interested in 20th century literature should read at least his four novels mentioned above and the short stories. The autobiographical stuff - Islands in the Stream and A Moveable Feast - are good reads, but not great. Let's face it: Hemingway was a very controversial character. But he lived life his way and died in his way at what is now a youg age, 61. I have found that he grows on you. The Sun Also Rises, like The Great Gatsby, is an almost perfect novel for its paucity of words and the visual images it serves up. In the long run, he has had such an impact on literature of the 20th century, that all who study the era bewteen the two great wars should read him, then make up their own mind about his greatness. But he will be remembered long after all who post here are gone and forgotten.
MortalTerror perhaps should be MortalError!
This is how arguments get started on this forum! Nowhere did I say anything about a great novel. You picked that up on your own. If you reread the post, you'll see that I said Hemingway wrote four pretty good novels, and I further said The Old Man and the Sea ia a novella. The four novels listed are his best, which most agree on. Garden of Eden and Across the River and into the Trees are not his best work. Islands in the Stream and A Moveable Feast are more biographical. Snows of Kilmanjaro, Francis Macomber etc are long short stories. So that leaves the four I listed. We have no argument. You were not paying attention to my post!